


Brother In Arms

by obsidiangrey



Series: States 'Verse [2]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: American Civil War, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Historically Accurate, there's no graphic depictions of violence but there is a lot of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-06
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 05:41:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4509966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obsidiangrey/pseuds/obsidiangrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had to get to the house. He had to, he had to, or his brother might not make it out of this alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ***The viewpoints expressed in this story are of the time period in which the story is set. The American Civil War was fought over states' rights to own slaves -- to own human beings -- and thus should have never been fought at all.

Massachusetts knew death very well.

1692, hardly a year since the charter had been delivered merging Plymouth and the Bay and he'd popped up, there had been a witch hysteria. Only twenty-two people had died, but he could still remember feeling so _cold,_ and constantly looking behind him even in broad daylight because _witches were there, they could be anywhere, he wasn't safe they weren't safe not safe not safe--_  Boston, in later years, had always been full of fire and revolution.

Then, 1777, he had joined his brother Rhode Island at Valley Forge to fight in the Continental Army. When he arrived, his brother's uniform was in tatters and he had eaten the leather of his shoes. Men who hadn't lost their limbs to frostbite left bloody footprints in the snow.

The War of 1812 had been... bad. The actual land of Massachusetts had not been affected very much and therefore the personification hadn't been either, but he remembered how silent Washington District had been in the aftermath, burns across her face and neck and shoulders, her very being scorched at the hands of Redcoats and arsonists.

Massachusetts knew death, yes, but dear God, this was _hell_.

It _smelled_ like death. The smell was everywhere. It was in the blood that stained the ground and his boots; it was in the screams of the wounded as soldiers were forced to retreat before they could save their fallen friends; it was in the air clogging up his throat and keeping him from breathing; it was in the dead who were being trampled underfoot as he stumbled over their still-warm corpses to get back to the Lacy House.

He wanted to have words with whomever the hell called this a civil war. They couldn't have been a soldier. War was anything but civil, and this was worse, this was countryman against countryman, literally brother against brother.

There were screams behind him, amidst the cannons firing and the guns being shot and the orders shouted hoarsely over the din. Massachusetts could feel the life of his people being snuffed out here and there, like little pinpricks at his heart, but he was too desperate to mourn. He had to keep going forward, he _had_ to.

He was bleeding. He didn't know how, or why, or when he'd been injured-- it felt like a gunshot wound, but he had no memory of being shot. That was okay. He could heal from a bullet with little more than a scar, and even that would fade by the new year. He wasn't like Sergeant Plunkett, who'd had both his arms blown off by a cannon blast, yet still managed to hold up their flag. He was lucky. He'd be fine, he was _lucky_.

His breath came in short heaves, frosting in the December air. His feet felt like bricks, his fingers were numb. He was lucky. He was alive.

He knew that he'd already passed the creek, so that meant he had to be close. He had to be close to the Lacy House, he had to get back.

His infantry regiment had been recalled. The artillery fire had been too much, they had retreated and been replaced with another unit, but he had been able to feel his brother close by, and his humanity had won out over his statehood. The states still wrote fragments of letters from Richmond, had smuggled West Virginia into the capital and out of Confederate territory;  _his brother was here_.

It was his brother's blood that was staining the blue uniform crimson, staining the _gray_ uniform crimson _._ It was his brother that he lugged through the trees and the bushes and the brush. It was his brother's blood that coated his face and hair and body and that gray gray _gray_ uniform was red like the British they'd kicked out so long ago _oh God_ \--

“Come on, little brother,” he gasped, hoping against desperate hope that his brother wouldn't bleed out before he got back to the hospital, and he realized that he'd been talking this whole time, through all his trains of thought and through each stumble and near-fall, over the bridges and the battlefield. “Stay with me. Please stay with me. Stay with me.”

They as personifications couldn't die, couldn't  _stay_ dead, but if his brother died he would be left with the corpses. He would wake up in the corpses, in the cold and the  _stench_.

He could see it, he could _see it_ , there it was, rising up in the distance. He could help his brother. Hang on Tim, hang on, we're almost there, don't let me down now we're almost there we're almost there.

“Hang in there... God, _please_... almost...”

December 13, 1862. The Union had been trying to make a decisive strike against the Confederacy, but the weather was cold and the conditions terrible. Their opponents were well entrenched in the hills and ground in front of them, and the Union soldiers had been decimated. The Lacy House had been taken from a Confederate general who had fled, turned into a makeshift hospital, but he didn't know if there would be any room left for his brother, if there were so many dead and dying on the battlefield, then how many more had been taken back--?

 _Almost there... almost there Timothy we're almost there almost there_.

Now, Massachusetts had been there when Pa had found the state of Tennessee wandering the fields of his land. He'd carried the kid back to the horses and helped explain things, and he'd introduced him to their siblings when they got back to Virginia. It was the same process they went through for every inch westward that the country moved and every new colony that came with it, yes, but he'd always have a soft spot for Tennessee.

(It had  _hurt_ more than he cared to admit when Tennessee had left without a word-- had hurt more than the rest of the south, had hurt just as much as his four siblings who had been with him since before he could remember, his sisters who had fought and won their independence with him, leaving without a single goodbye.)

He wouldn't write home to tell Pa that another one of his kids had suffered because Massachusetts had been too late. He _wouldn't_.

There was snow on the ground from an earlier storm. Outside the Lacy House, dead bodies were stacked to one side in piles (it smelled like death but in a different way), and there were more Union soldiers scattered about, injured or healthy and waiting for an order to move.

His fingers brushed against his brother's hair as he reached out to open the door and came away slick with blood. He staggered inside.

“Jones-- Jones! What the _hell_ are you doing with that bastard?!”

He flinched at the voice of one of his many superior officers, half-walking, half-falling further away from the door. There were men lying inches apart on the floors, the tables, the stairs...

There were men conferring with one another, most likely over a revised plan of attack or a retreat. They were waiting for an answer.

“Please,” he choked out. The room was swaying slightly in his foggy vision-- or perhaps he was the one doing the swaying? “Please, he... His name's Timothy. He's my brother, he's only fourteen.”

A white lie, just a little white lie. Sixty-seven years a state, and decades more as a personification, but that was-- too young, still too young for this, too young to fight in a war like this-- too young to _die_ in a war like this. To wake up in the cold and the bodies and the gore.

The nurses turned to look pointedly at the officers. The officer who had yelled at him didn't know how to respond to Massachusetts' words. The others looked dully back at the nurses.

“Leave 'im be, Major,” one of them finally sighed, and the officer turned with a wordless snarl.

One of the nurses looked kindly to Massachusetts. She was short, plain, pale under a faint sheen of sweat and the blood on her hands. “We've just cleared off some space in the cabinets,” she told him gently. “Put your brother there- do what you can to stop the bleeding and try to keep him warm. Someone will be by with blankets and bricks from the fire...”

Massachusetts had enough lucidity to recognize the presence of one of his people in the nurse in front of him, and he dipped his head in a grateful nod. It was the best he could manage-- he didn't think he could smile, didn't want to know what it would look like if he did.

Jackets were useful. His was already starting to fall into tattered pieces, so he ripped parts off for bandages and ripped other parts off to dip into his nearly-empty canteen and placed the cool cloth on his brother's forehead. The last trickle of water he poured into his brother's mouth. Tennessee's head was resting on his lap-- if he held his brother through the night, he might not die.

_Don't leave again. Dear God, don't leave me again. Please, please, don't leave me again don't go don't_

His brother's eyes cracked open-- in the shadowed light, far from the fireplace, they looked more gray than blue. It took time for them to focus, but even when they did, Tennessee wasn't all there. The younger state opened his mouth and drew in a rattling breath, only for a harsh coughing fit to take its place. Frothy blood bubbled over his lips.

“Hey, take it easy, now,” Massachusetts croaked, wiping the blood away with an already bloody sleeve. It left another red smear over the dirt covering his brother's skin. “Take it easy, I've got you.”

“P...a?”

The single word was more painful than words had a right to be, more painful than a bullet could ever be.

“It's your brother, Tim. Patrick. Massachusetts.”

The clamor and the moans of the dying were so loud that no one heard him. Massachusetts didn't think he could bring himself to care if they had.

But Tennessee was smiling dazedly, a feverish light in his eyes and his teeth stained red like his clothes.

“Pa...! You _came_... I- El'zbeth's... sorry... an' th'others...” The Tennessee accent was slurred and punctuated with more coughing fits and more blood dribbling onto his chin. “'m sorry, Pa-- I... sorry, Pa...”

He was crying again, could hardly see his brother's face through the fog clouding his vision and the burning which accompanied it-- he tried to speak around the lump in his throat and only partially succeeded.

“It's all right, Tim. It's-- it's all right.”

“Ca... Can I... come home? Pa-- I... home...”

“Yes. Yes, you can come home-- come home, please. We want you to come home.”

Tennessee didn't reply, blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth, but he smiled even wider. Not far away, a Union soldier missing a leg watched them sadly.

Confederate soldiers brought to the Lacy House were taken captive, but two days later, Massachusetts had woken up on the floor of the mansion-turned-hospital to find the space next to him cold and empty save a gray cap belonging to a Confederate uniform. The edges were frayed, and there was a long tear along the side: a too-close meeting with a Minié ball.

The Army of the Potomac retreated, needing to recuperate from the devastating loss. The bullet which had ripped through Massachusetts' shoulder gifted him a long and cramped train ride back north, and he took the opportunity to go to D.C. and speak with his father.

“Timothy's all right,” he told the exhausted, broken man, lying pale as if he were on his deathbed. Massachusetts refused to believe that could be a possibility. “He was at Fredericksburg, but I got him out. He's all right.”

Much as Tennessee had done, his father tried to speak and ended up coughing, flecks of blood from his mouth staining his skin.


	2. Chapter 2

“Git up.”

Tennessee couldn't open his eyes for a moment, but something in the voice's tone made him struggle to consciousness as quickly as he could. He tried to go for his rifle, only to meet with empty air and a searing pain through his chest and stomach-- shit, _shit_. Ow. Shit. Instead of the hard, rocky ground of a battlefield, he was lying on something soft and warm-- but that didn't make sense. The last thing he remembered was charging forward with the rest of his regiment in the midst of the smoke and shellfire, and-- and then? If he had been taken back to the base camp, who was speaking to him like that?

Two possibilities slowly drifted through his hazy train of thought, far slower than they would normally: he was in an enemy hospital, or he had _really_ pissed off one of his superior officers.

Dear Lord, if Alexander found out--

\--the world was a blur of brown and gray that he couldn't bring into focus.

“Git up, damn you!”

A smudge of gray and butternut swam into view. He blinked again, and the smudge sharpened into a blur, which sharpened after another blink into a bloodstained Confederate with wispy blonde hair and dirt caking her face and clothes.

“ _Git up!”_

“E-Eli--?”

Elizabeth Jones, state of Virginia, let out a sharp breath through her nose. One of her arms was held tight to her side-- her shoulder was where most of the blood was coming from, and the rest caking the hems of her pants and boots and splattered over her jacket likely belonged to others. A trickle of blood came from her nose and her ears, a close encounter with a falling shell and the ensuing explosion. “Some poor soul from up north's bled out in the other room, an' they're all payin' their respects. We're gettin' out. _Now_.”

She had to pull him to his feet. Tennessee wobbled unsteadily all the same, and leaned heavily on her good arm. He hadn't known his sister was fighting, but wasn't all that surprised, either. She'd started to speak up against Alexander, too, and the Confederacy did not take kindly to criticism. The long blonde tresses which she had once been so proud of had been hacked off, and her chest was bound tightly so he wouldn't have known she was a girl if he hadn't known her face on sight.

The floor tilted underneath him, and his stomach rolled. His vision tunneled and went dark for an instant-- maybe longer, he didn't know, didn't--

“Pa?”

The question slipped out before he could stop it, and he instantly wished it hadn't. They didn't talk about Pa-- they didn't talk about the _Union_ , and if they did, they called him “the Union” and nothing else. They didn't talk about the Union where any of his older siblings could hear: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. They _definitely_ didn't talk about the Union where the Confederacy could hear.

If the South succeeded in winning the war, Pa wouldn't be  _Pa_ , and they couldn't forget that.

He'd been good about it, hadn't said a word about Pa0- about the Union, the _Union_. Hadn't said a word about any of their other siblings-- about the other states up north. It only hurt to talk about it, and they were all already in enough pain as it was. But he'd taken West Virginia north when his sister's land split itself in two, a microcosm of the war raging around them, and Alexander had not been pleased.

Virginia twisted to look at him, fire in her eyes. “Pa--” The fire went out as quickly as it had come, and she looked like she'd swallowed her tongue. “Union ain't here,” she finished in a harsh tone.

“He--” _carried me here, who carried me here?_ The Union soldier behind them wasn't easily recognizable underneath the blood and layers of dirt, but Tennessee knew his face just as he knew his sister's, and his vision tunneled again.

Virginia turned as well and let out another sharp breath. “Patrick,” she said unnecessarily. And then, very soft, “Pa ain't here, never was.”

They hobbled out, picking their way through the patients lying wall-to-wall on the floors. A couple of Confederates, smudges of red-gray in a sea of red-blue, watched them leave in silence-- Tennessee couldn't tell if it was jealousy lurking in their eyes or relief, but he hoped it was the latter. He'd feel the same way, two more souls that the Army of the Potomac failed to take. A couple of the Union men watched them leave and spat at their boots, but they didn't say anything either. He wondered what that said about them all.

In another room, he could hear a man reading from the Bible, and wondered if the dead man was from the north or south. Hadn't his sister mentioned?

The cold night air took his breathe away, and his legs crumpled. Virginia grunted, but dragged him into the woods all the same, ducking into the shadow of the trees as soon as she was able.

“I'm steppin' us back to camp,” she said to him.

“Are...sure?” It was getting hard to breathe again. Tennessee didn't want to look down and see how badly he'd been shot, though he couldn't now even if he'd wanted to. He wasn't sure if his vision was going dark again, or if he just plain couldn't see because it was night. “Your... shoulder.”

She let out another sharp puff of air which clouded in the cold air, her nostrils flaring. “We have medical tents. I ain't the idiot fool enough to himself dragged to a hospital full of damnyankees."

“Fool 'nuff... to come o' your own free will.”

Virginia actually growled at him, then, a low noise deep in her throat. “I'm your older sibling. Always gonna come for you.”

She said nothing of how Massachusetts had done the same.

Tennessee didn't respond, and she squinted to look at his face through the dark. He was too pale. He'd lost too much blood. His eyes were shut. Distantly, she noticed his hat was missing.

From the Lacy House, she could hear the screams and moans of the dying. From the battlefield, she could still hear the pounding of artillery-- whose artillery, she wasn't sure, but either way she could feel the lives of her people being extinguished by the masses, could feel each cannonball slamming into Virginian soil if she focused hard enough.

Her stomach churned in protest, and she swallowed bile.

A _step_ forward, two, and the camp the Army of North Virginia had set up was sprawled in front of her. The medical tents weren't hard to find; she just carried her brother and followed the sounds of the wounded.

**Author's Note:**

> The nurse who speaks to Massachusetts is Clara Barton. Historically, she worked as a nurse at the Battle of Fredericksburg along with many other battles during the Civil War. Founded the America branch of the International Red Cross, advocated women's rights, gained the title of "angel of the battlefield" because she was on the front lines so much of the time.
> 
> The Battle of Fredericksburg was a loss for the Union, with casualties over 12,000 (more than twice the number for the Confederacy). The charge led against entrenched Confederate soldiers on the 13th of December is regarded as being one of the most one-sided battles of the war. The Lacy House, also known as Chatham, was the mansion of a Confederate supporter who got kicked out when the Union troops arrived.
> 
> It was difficult enough trying to fit all of the wounded Union soldiers inside. Men were lying on every flat surface available (floors, tables, chairs, shelving, stairs, etc). At some point, people started carrying in wounded Confederate soldiers. The men in command were highly opposed to this; the doctors and nurses present refused to turn them away. Most soldiers on both sides were in their twenties or even younger.
> 
> Patrick Jones --> Massachusetts  
> Timothy Jones --> Tennessee  
> El'zbeth/Elizabeth Jones --> Virginia


End file.
